Martial Arts

dir: Doug Liman

2024

There are, like, literally thousands of movies you can imagine some lazy ingrates could want to do remakes of. There’s no doubt someone wanting to remake Casablanca, somewhere. Someone who thinks of doing a new version of Billy Wilder’s The Apartment or Sunset Boulevard.

I mean, the reprobates wanting to make the umpteenth version of one of Shakespeare’s plays in modern dress; they’re just uninspired hacks trying to borrow someone else's credibility.

I ask this question with all due respect and humility: who the fuck thought Road House needed to be remade? Is it the same person that thought Point Break also needed to be redone, in order to completely desecrate Patrick Swayze’s grave?

If this is happening now, surely the remake of Weekend at Bernie’s can’t be far behind?

Road House needed a remake like I needed a fourth superfluous nipple on my forehead, but what are you going to do? Who could say no to Jake Gyllenhaal and his quivering magnificent physique?

The one from the 80s? It had Patrick Swayze. Patrick Swayze. Fresh off the success of Dirty Dancing, Swayze strode through the bonkers action flick with the supreme confidence of someone so sure of himself that it didn’t matter if he didn’t look like he could lift a kettlebell let alone throw some guy three times his size out of a scuzzy bar.

It didn’t matter. Dalton was that confident.

(Hai Phượng)

dir: Lê Văn Kiệt

2019

Well, now I can say I’ve seen 3 Vietnamese flicks.

It was inevitable that I was going to see this, the first in what I assume is eventually going to be at least a trilogy of violent Viet flicks where women beat three hundred shades of fuck out of their opponents in order to protect themselves and those they love.

It also helps, of course, that it was so conveniently accessible on Netflix.

I’m not going to argue about how the title in English makes less sense, but I can see how they didn’t want people to confuse this flick with the recentish flick Fury about Brad Pitt and an angry tank. In Vietnamese the title of the flick is the name of the protagonist, being Hai Phuong.

This flick is set contemporarily. The flick Furies, which is pretty much the origin story for the main villain here, called Thanh Soi, was set in the 1990s. The main character in Furie is played by Veronica Ngo. She also plays a character seeking revenge on the jerks who butchered her family in Furies AND she directed it as well. Now you should be thoroughly confused.

Just to be very flippant for a sec, I liked Furie plenty, but Furies is probably a better flick, mostly because it triples down on everything, especially the violence, and is less of a melodrama. But that’s just by the by.

Let’s focus on this one, aye? Hai Phuong lives a quiet life in the countryside. Plenty implies that she’s way better, and way meaner than the peasant folk that surround her. Like the trigger for all these kinds of action flicks, someone makes a terribly stupid mistake and kidnaps her kid. They don’t do it deliberately, as in, they’re just a gang of jerks who kidnap kids. It’s their bread and butter.

But the cardinal mistake is that they kidnapped her kid, not knowing or caring that she would punch a hole through the world in order to get her kid back, let alone destroy their gang, and all their hopes and dreams for the future.

dir: RZA

We like to think that, with enough love, time money and knowledge, we can make great things happen. The disinterested universe, however, just doesn’t work that way.

It would come as no surprise to anyone that knows anything about rap music, The RZA, or the Wu Tang Clan and its many offshoots, that he has a deep love and knowledge of classic Hong Kong martial arts flicks. Almost every Wu Tang (et al) song I can think of has a sample from an old kung fu movie, replete with poorly overdubbed dialogue and the sounds of people fighting.

A natural next step, you could argue, would be that a man who so wished he could insert himself into the past, into the movies he loves, the movies that consume his vision, his hopes and dreams, would try to make such a movie. And so we have The Man With the Iron Fists, starring RZA in a lead role.

In this he has endeavoured to make a movie like the movies he loves. Unfortunately, he is in the same position I am in.

Let me clarify: I love those movies too. I’d love to make one of those movies. I’d be terrible at it, though, because I have no idea how to direct a martial arts movie, let alone any movie. I don’t possess the skills necessary, or the hard-won experience required, and I wouldn’t magically possess them just because I’ve watched like a thousand of those flicks over the last 30 years.

dir: Gavin O’Connor

Men. Manly Men. Beating the crap out of each other.

This is easily the most masculine film I’ve seen this year, in a lot of ways. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact it’s a very good thing.

This is also one of the best flicks I’ve seen this year. At the very least it’s one of the flicks I’ve enjoyed the most this year. There are only a few aspects that squandered the tremendous amount of goodwill and positive feelings I had about the film, and none of them have anything to do with the phenomenal performances put in by nearly all the actors involved.

And yet, it’s still a flick about a bunch of guys beating the absolute shit out of each other.

Soldiers fight for king, queen or country because they have to. Mercenaries fight for coin. Warriors fight because they live to fight. Warrior doesn’t really sit well as a good title for this flick, because the people fighting don’t necessarily want to fight.

But they have to.

There’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to fight flicks. It’s a genre of sports film so well-trodden that it’s virtually impossible to say anything new. It can be said in a more contemporary way, but the themes are ancient, as are the beats and rhythms of the screenplays.